George Santos says he opposes marriage equality on the second anniversary of his marriage to a man

Out former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) spent his last hours in office attacking LGBTQ+ rights, including marriage equality.

Thursday was, he claimed, his second anniversary of marriage to a man named Matt, and he shared pictures with his husband on social media. Later in the day, he told a group of reporters in the Capitol that he opposes his own right to get married.

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Santos shot back with an accusation that Max Miller is a “woman-beater.”

“I was an opposer of gay marriage,” Santos said, according to an audio recording obtained by Business Insider, when asked about how he works with the more extreme Republicans in the House.

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The current Republican party platform denounces marriage equality, saying that “traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society.” It attacks the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision as “silly” because it legalized marriage equality in all 50 states and “robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

Santos’s personal view, despite being married to a man himself, isn’t different from his party platform’s. He said he got married “because that was the option” but doesn’t think it should be called “marriage.”

“I thought it should have been a civil union,” he told the reporters. “It would have given us the same benefits, the same rights under the law.”

“Making it marriage was never the business of the government,” he said, even though the government issued opposite-sex couples’ marriage certificates long before it did the same for same-sex couples, something that people saying that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage never had a problem with until the conversation was about LGBTQ+ equality. “I’m not saying I oppose just gay marriage. I oppose marriage by the government in general.”

“To force that on society was a problem,” he claimed, even though same-sex marriage has been legal in at least some states for 20 years now, and no state has “forced” anyone to marry a spouse of the same sex. Moreover, the state of New York legalized marriage equality by passing a bill in 2011, so his own marriage was not the result of a court case.

“That is why we’re still debating, right?” he said, bizarrely implying that if the Supreme Court had never ruled on marriage equality and states still banned same-sex couples from getting married, then no one would be arguing about the issue.

On Friday, Santos posed in front of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) famous transphobic sign and posted a video to social media about it.

“Hey boys and girls, trust the science. Two genders!” Santos said, standing next to the sign.

The House voted to expel Santos in a 311-114 vote on Friday, making him the sixth member of Congress to ever be expelled. Three of the five previously expelled members were removed for fighting for the Confederacy, and the other two had been convicted of charges related to accepting bribes and other crimes.